Election is finally over!

Nov 7, 2012

To say that I’m thrilled is a grotesque understatement. Thrilled that my President won a second term, affording him the opportunity to do the additional work necessary to fulfill as many of his previous promises as he’s humanly capable. People criticized him for not having changed his message. I say, why change it if it’s a great one? The message remained the same…we can only hope that this time around he gets full cooperation from our Congress to work with him and each other to return our United States to glory. Because it is such a glorious country. So much promise.

I love traveling the world. Love experiencing the different places, meeting all the different people, experiencing the different cultures, really getting a true sense of wherever I find myself. I adore my different homes. Because I’ve spent so much time during the past decade or so dividing my time between here and Europe, that I genuinely consider Europe my second home. But no matter where I go, or how much I love it, admire, respect, appreciate my other homes…this one remains my favorite. And not for sentimental reasons. Okay, yes, I’m a sentimental person. And not. A moment like this…Jesus God…did I just use a line from Kelly Clarkson’s first single after winning the first ever American Idol? Fuck it! A moment like this gives me pause. I have always been fully conscious of the country I’ve grown up in. I pledged allegiance, I prayed to God to preserve us, and I watched, and listened, and felt, the country zig zag, deal with a zillion conflicts, experience the pendulum swing wildly, then less so, then wildly, then less so, then wildly again. This way and that. But throughout the years…even as I felt, believed wholeheartedly, many, many times, that there was no place for me in my country, that if I chose to remain here that I must accept and be grateful for my place on the sidelines, as an outsider, a second or third class citizen, that I had no choice but to embrace an ideology that excluded me, my friends, and assorted family…I was, am, and will always be a proud citizen of the United States of America. Because yes, although at times I felt alone here, I wasn’t.

At the tender age of 14 my parents did the unthinkable and allowed me to usher at a theatre showing Robert Patrick’s “Kennedy’s Children”. If my parents had known the subject matter they NEVER would have given me permission to do it. But they didn’t and so I did. And it saved my 14 year old, suicidal, life. Because in the play there were characters I identified with. Granted they were all completely fucked up, but they existed. And they were up there on that stage. Their lives were considered worth the price of admission. And they weren’t jokes, they were human beings with just as much right as anyone else to have their stories told. It was a revelation. It meant that I did in fact have a place…not just in this world but in my country. It may not have been the most secure place but it was a place nonetheless. And so I didn’t kill myself. I chose to live and create my own place in this crazy ass quilt of ours. This exquisitely beautiful mosaic. This totally insane, breathtaking, brilliant, schizophrenic, rich, revolutionary, dream of a country. My home.

Obama’s election was historic for the innumerable reasons it was. But his re-election is evolutionary. Progressive. I know that there is and will always be a sizable percentage of the population who stand steadfastly in opposition to progress. But no matter how many stand firm, no matter how threatening they may at times feel it necessary to be, progress, like water, flows. And over time erodes even the most seemingly solid, fervent of opponents. It’s unstoppable. My life, my voice, my thoughts, my opinions, my beliefs, my feelings…I…count. Because in America, each and every one of us matters. That may not have been the original belief or intent of all our founding fathers, but it’s the principal that they chose to declare in our constitution. And hypocrites though some of them most certainly were…I am eternally grateful to each and every one of them.